Marine

At least they are willing to invest in new ships. We all can see that the only reason why they ordered more of a broken design is because one or more politicians are getting rich from the frigate design and build.

I don't work for a CAT1 office but I do know that they operate under immense political pressure. Hard to fathom any other country being any different.

Formerly Known as Freefalling

As I've posted elsewhere here, Germany's military is in bad shape. One cause that I see, and this aplies to even the US, is their design and procurement process. I understand that new technology is expensive and unproven to a certain degree, but defense budgets trying to soak up massive cost overruns due in part to a bad design or new tech is killing some projects. Spain's new sub and that debacle (math is hard, proofreading is more hardererist), Germany's new frigate, the F-35, the Ford-class carriers, who knows what else...they are killing defense budgets. Nations like Germany that are underfunded from the get go have to eat these cost overruns AND deal with stuff that's broken which in turn takes away scarce resources from keeping their other stuff afloat (see what I did there?).

"Measure twice, cut once" is absent from modern procurement and some nations can't afford to eat poorly managed or designed projects.

Yes, hands down or at least reard companies who come in at or under budget with penalities for busting their budget and/ or deliverable dates. Cost plus encourages companies to drastically underbid because they know they will make up the money. A contract I used to work was something like 337 million over 5 years. We went over budget by 3.5 to 4 million. That's pretty tame when you think about it with almost all of that due to labor. They cut manning and then had to shell out for overtime, which is still cheaper than carrying 20-30 extra guys on contract to cover those manning gaps.

FFP would/ should make companies think about their pricing and more importantly, their "promises."

Marine

Yes, hands down or at least reard companies who come in at or under budget with penalities for busting their budget and/ or deliverable dates. Cost plus encourages companies to drastically underbid because they know they will make up the money. A contract I used to work was something like 337 million over 5 years. We went over budget by 3.5 to 4 million. That's pretty tame when you think about it with almost all of that due to labor. They cut manning and then had to shell out for overtime, which is still cheaper than carrying 20-30 extra guys on contract to cover those manning gaps.

FFP would/ should make companies think about their pricing and more importantly, their "promises."

I think there needs to be some type of change but there is no way that industry would be willing to take that risk, not without major price increases to proposals. I do think that major change is needed in how they get awarded and the contract type, but fix pricing major systems will end up costing even more.

Or you get an idiotic contracting officer who moves to fix price LPTA....